Colorado has the seventh-strongest charter-school laws in the country, a three spot drop from last year, according to an annual rankings report.

The report, released by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, says more about what’s new in other states than a weakening of Colorado rules, officials said.

“The differences between our state and other states are a lot of little things that are not explicit in law but are still in practice,” said Jim Griffin, president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools. “By any other external measure, the state of our state is at the top of the list.”

For example, Colorado law does not require charter-school authorizers to put reasons for denial of a charter school in writing, but in practice — and given the availability of an appeals process — Griffin said all of them do.

According to the report, 10 states lifted caps on the number of charter schools allowed in 2011; seven states improved their rules for district authorizers; and 10 states improved their support for charter-school funding and facilities.

This year, Maine earned the No. 1 spot after passing a law in 2011 allowing charter schools, and after opening its first and only such school.

According to the report, potential areas for improvement in Colorado law include enacting statutory guidelines for relationships between charter schools and educational service providers, as well as developing statutory guidelines to govern multischool charter contracts.

Marking the first time Colorado has wrestled with policy for charter-school authorizers, the State Board of Education last week approved a set of guidelines — taken almost entirely from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers’ published best practices.

The guidelines suggest that every school district that accepts charter-school applications should create a clear application process. Authorizers also are directed to give charter schools more autonomy on curriculum and teaching practices, focusing instead on tracking student academic growth.

The approval of those guidelines did not make it into the analysis in the new report but would have bumped Colorado’s score up a few more points simply for putting those practices on the books, Griffin said.

Griffin said there isn’t anything other states are doing that he would envy for Colorado charters.

Yesenia Robles was a breaking news reporter for The Denver Post, working with the organization from 2010-2016. She covered education, crime and courts, and the northern suburbs. Raised in Denver, she graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder and is a native Spanish speaker.

Spain came under repeated attack starting Thursday in what authorities called linked terrorist incidents, when a driver swerved a van into crowds in Barcelona’s historic Las Ramblas district, killing more than a dozen people and injuring scores of others. Early Friday, an attempted attack unfolded in a town down the coast

If there’s one superhero character whose rise might be most tied to the events of World War II, it is Captain America, who emerged from the minds of legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and sprung forth from an iconic 1941 debut cover on which Cap smacks Hitler right in the kisser.

A customer dining at Washington’s Oceanaire restaurant noticed an unusual line at the bottom of his receipt: “Due to the rising costs of doing business in this location, including costs associated with higher minimum wage rates, a 3% surcharge has been added to your total bill.”